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Tell HN: Impassable Cloudflare challenges are ruining my browsing experience

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell HN: Impassable Cloudflare challenges are ruining my browsing experience

#81

Post by shadowgovt »

Unfortunately, your setup makes you look like a scraper: no history for Cloudflare to identify, the sort of browser / OS config someone would use to homebrew an automated "I sure am not a bot, look at how authentic my user-agent is!" bot, and so on. If you also have JavaScript disabled and clear your cookies frequently, Cloudflare can't fingerprint your machine to know you passed a trust-check in the past.

Maybe keeping a heavily-sandboxed Chrome in a VM for situations where Cloudflare is getting in your way might help?

(In the large: this has been an issue a long time coming. Quite a bit of cyberpunk predicts the future where the web bifurcates into the "regular" web that is sanitized, corporate, controlled, and used by most people... And the "everyone else" web that is not, with all the pros and cons that entails. The tech has evolved to the point that companies that want a service provider "keeping the bad guys away" for them can pay to have that done, at the cost of false-positives... But at their scale, the false-positives may not matter to them).

Re: Tell HN: Impassable Cloudflare challenges are ruining my browsing experience

#82

Post by ryandrake »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #52
_bin_ wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this nevertheless happens all the time. i have an old linkedin account i haven't logged into in years and can't be bothered to dig up the credentials so one of my e-mails gets stupid "network updates". one must log in to disable these and navigate to some obscure settings page in one of the most heinously overcrowded UIs on the web. so i just flagged it all as spam and hoped it hurts their deliverability a little.

Honestly I click an unsubscribe link but if it requires me to complete a survey or fill out a form, I just nix the tab and spam filter the email. I'm nobody's fucking admin assistant and my time is valuable: you know my fucking email and could easily add it to the think, or at the most, ask me to type it into a box if you MUST. Anything more than that, if I have to manually opt out of "types" of messages or whatever,…

Yep, I just spam filter the E-mails now. If that act adds 0.0001% to that sender having future E-mail deliverability problems, then all the better. If it's commercial or political and I didn't explicitly ask for the sender to E-mail, then it's spam.

Re: Tell HN: Impassable Cloudflare challenges are ruining my browsing experience

#83

Post by shadowgovt »

shiomiru wrote: post #17
solardev wrote: post #2

You're collateral damage in the web's war against bots :( Unfortunately, I think the Cloudflare challenges are designed to filter out users similar to your profile... once you stray far enough from the norm, it just looks like a bot / suspicious traffic to them. Statistically there's not enough users like you (privacy-conscious Linux users on nonstandard browsers) for them to really care enough to do anything about i…

The sad part is that it's trivial to get around CF's bot protection if you're writing a bot (just use curl-impersonate and buy residential IPs), but it's pretty much impossible to bypass as a human if their magical black box doesn't like your browser and/or IP address.

Surprisingly, it still works as intended. Yes, it won't keep professionals and dedicated bot-fabricators out, but that's like 5% of the botters out there; the rest are the bot equivalent of script kiddies who can't be bothered, and it filters them great. Meanwhile, the script kiddies have a process that still works on non-CF sites, so they don't need to improve their process.

Re: Tell HN: Impassable Cloudflare challenges are ruining my browsing experience

#84

Post by TiredOfLife »

magic_smoke_ee wrote: post #59

I can't use any of the kerbalspaceprogram.com domains because of improper discrimination against IPv6 clients triggered by CloudFlare. Error 1015 Ray ID: .... • xxxx-xx-xx xx:xx:xx UTC You are being rate limited What happened? The owner of this website (wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com) has banned you temporarily from accessing this website. This sort of monoculture creates an Orwellian SPoF.

Cloudflare owns kerbalspaceprogram?

Re: Tell HN: Impassable Cloudflare challenges are ruining my browsing experience

#85

Post by ghjfrdghibt »

gruez wrote: post #62
ghjfrdghibt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is scummy companies like cloudflare which are causing these issues. If your software is blocking legitimate users then your software is shit at its job. It's not the users fault.

>The issue is scummy companies like cloudflare which are causing these issues. If your software is blocking legitimate users then your software is shit at its job. It's not the users fault. But if you're going out of your way to look suspicious (ie. "I use a heavily customized Firefox config on Linux"), surely you'd agree at some point it goes from "your software is shit at its job" to "it's your fault for looking su…

[flagged]

Re: Tell HN: Impassable Cloudflare challenges are ruining my browsing experience

#86

Post by _yb2s »

jillyboel wrote: post #46
ugotjelly wrote: post #41

What do you mean impassable challenge...? Why isn't it passable? Are you a robot?

[flagged]

Sadly, we probably all are LLMs/bots on the internet at this point, just talking to one another. The real humans have all become fed up and are now mostly off fishing by a lake.

Re: Tell HN: Impassable Cloudflare challenges are ruining my browsing experience

#87

Post by TiredOfLife »

bastard_op wrote: post #24

I deal with this fairly commonly, presumably because I use linux, and we all know only botnets use linux. Occasionally with cloudflare I'll just get summary rejection and supposed blocking of my IP, but either it's summary rejection or a pass without challenge. Recently I had to deal with this for alibaba just to look at something, which I usually just use torbrowser with, and finally gave up as I couldn't pass the c…

My main desktop for the past year has been Steamdeck with linux. And don't get any excess Cloudflare challenges.

Re: Tell HN: Impassable Cloudflare challenges are ruining my browsing experience

#90

Post by PaulHoule »

It's ironic but I was having terrible problems accessing archive.today when I was using Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1) that cleared up when I switched to either my ISP's provider or Google's 8.8.8.8. I was not the only one

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38063548

What's funny about it is that as a human I get tormented by those things all the time but I have been writing bots since 1999 and have yet to have had CAPTCHAs affect a webcrawling project in a big way: for instance I have a bot that collected 800,000 images from 4 web sites since last April, at times I thought they had anti-bot countermeasures but I realized that when they were having problems it was because the wheels were coming off their web site (don't blame me, that is 0.03 requests/second and are not parallelized and pipelined like the requests from a web browser.) I'm also prototyping one that can look at an article like

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-diversifying-dna-origami-gener...

see if there are links to journal articles in there, determine if the articles are Open Access and pick out an image for social... so far no problems. But if I want to pay my electric bill there's a CAPTCHA -- I mean, what kind of bot wants to pay my electric bill? (Kinda seems like it is asking for a lawsuit in this day and age if it prevents anyone 'differently abled' from accessing essential services...)

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